10.28.2004

Last word on the explosives

since it is more a political issue where lies are swapped back and forth instead of something anyone really wants to get to the truth of.

Of course the Pentagon and President Bush are sticking to the line that no one is at fault because the explosives went missing before troops arrived. Their proof is the fact that the troops which arrived on April 10, 2003 didn't find the explosives. As I have noted earlier this is totally beside the point. Oh, and it's also proven to be a lie because the troops only spent the night there and didn't search the complex.

And now it seems that a local Minneapolis news crew was with the 101st when they entered Al Qaqaa on April 18, 2003. Judging by GPS readings they think they may have been in the same area the explosives are missing from. They broke into bunker after bunker and found an huge amount of crap labeled "explosives." Then they left, and they left all the bunkers open. And oh yeah, Iraqis were coming and going freely around the area at the time. They have several photos on their site of what appears to be roughly a zillion pounds of explosives.

Let's review the timeline:

Explosives were inspected in Jan 2003 by UN inspectors.
Inspectors check them on March 15th 2003 and find the seals on the bunkers were not disturbed.
War begins 4-5 days later (depending on your timezone I guess)
April 4 2003, 3rd Infantry Engineer Brigade finds thousands of boxes of white powder that turns out to be explosives (no word on IAEA seals)
April 10 2003, 2nd Brigade (Strike) 101st Airborne was at the site. White House says they didn't find the explosives but the 2nd/101st commander Colonel Joseph Anderson, spokesman Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, and embedded journalists all say they just spent the night there and didn't do any searching and only heard about all this crap in the past week.
April 18, 2003, the news crew cited above went into Al Qaqaa with the 101st, looked around, found a bunch of (so far) unidentified explosives and left, leaving the place wide open while Iraqis were roaming around freely (not trying to blame the 101st, it wasn't their mission, but in hindsight, someone shoulda known better).

UPDATE: This makes me sick. I respected this man as mayor of New York and thought he was quite an inspiration during 9-11, but I've been a bit disturbed to watch him lie his ass off over and over again on TV. He's become nothing but a fucking partisan hack and this takes the cake.

Rudy Giuliani on the Today show: "The actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"

Yep, blame the troops for it even though it was never their mission to search the fucking place to begin with, you wretched soldout little political twit.

ANOTHER UPDATE:KSTP shows that the IAEA seals were intact in their video from April 18, 2003.

I'd like to say that none of this indicates much of a mistake on the part of Bush. The blunder seems to be more on the Pentagon than anyone. However, I think that if I were president I would have a nagging suspicion in the back of my head that we might wanna tell someone to secure or destroy any weapons they run across, and I would take responsbility for any mistakes like this because "the buck stops here" rather than doing what Bush does best and try to blame any innocent people he can think of.

And this is the real issue in all this, so far as the president is concerned. When news of the missing explosives broke, instead of acting like adults about it they went into attack mode, lied their asses off and tried to blame other people when there was no reason to. Par for the course for this lot.

Can't say I look forward to four years of Kerry, but damn if I won't cry for this nation if we get four more years of these freaks.

"Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known and seldom welcome." --Thomas Jefferson